Falsani: Seamus Heaney knew how to give

Sept. 3, 2013

Updated Sept. 8, 2013 12:50 p.m.

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Poet Seamus Heaney reads from his new book of poetry, District and Circle, at the Guardian Hay Festival in this 2006 file photo. Heaney, who is recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century, died Aug 30. CHRIS JACKSON, GETTY IMAGES

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“Seamus has been with me on every journey I have taken, and there have been many times when a retreat into his words has kept me afloat,” Bono of U2 wrote in a tribute the day after Seamus Heaney's death. “Some of those phrases are like tattoos for me, worn very close to the heart.” NICOLE BENGIVENO, NEW YORK TIMES

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A few of Seamus Heaney's poetry collections, including "Field Work," Cathleen's favorite open to "The Otter," one of her favorite of the late Irish poet's works. The brass otter was a gift to Falsani from her husband. CATHLEEN FALSANI, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The invitation to Falsani's 1997 wedding incorporated a Celtic symbol for unity and a verse from Seamus Heaney's poem "Station Island." The couple fell in love reading the Irish Nobel laureate's poems aloud to each other. CATHLEEN FALSANI, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Poet Seamus Heaney reads from his new book of poetry, District and Circle, at the Guardian Hay Festival in this 2006 file photo. Heaney, who is recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century, died Aug 30.CHRIS JACKSON, GETTY IMAGES

One of my favorite stories to tell is about the interview I wanted most, but didn’t get.

It was 2005 and I had just signed a contract to write what would be my first book — a collection of profiles of mostly well-known people with whom I’d spent time talking one-on-one, face-to-face about their spiritual lives. Artists. Writers. Thinkers. Scientists. The odd rock star.

Sitting in my publisher’s office in New York City, she asked me to dream out loud: If I could interview anyone for the project, who was No. 1 on my wish list?

I answered without hesitation: Seamus Heaney.

To say that I was a fan of the Irish poet and Nobel laureate is an understatement of epic proportions. My love of Mr. Heaney’s words ran (and runs) deep, like a vena cava that ferries lifeblood to my soul’s imagination.

My husband and I literally (and literarily) fell in love by reading Mr. Heaney’s poetry aloud to one another.

“The Otter.” “Sunlight.” “From the Republic of Conscience.” And of course the famous “Digging” from his first collection, 1966’s “Death of a Naturalist.”

A verse from his “Station Island,” the one that ends, “And my heart flushed, like somebody set free,” graced our wedding invitation.

Mr. Heaney’s poetry is earthy and true, whether he’s describing a bog, a body (of a lover or a dead soldier), or something far more ethereal.

His poetry is without piety but never profane. While his words elevate hearts and minds, his feet ever were planted in the peat and sod of his Eire.

Though I didn’t know it when I blurted out his name in my editor’s office that afternoon in New York City, Mr. Heaney and I shared a publishing house, so I was able to reach out to him directly.

I wrote a breathless, achingly earnest letter requesting an interview. Anywhere. Any time. I’ll hop on a plane at a moment’s notice ...

A few days later, Mr. Heaney responded via a two-page fax from Dublin. He began by thanking me and then apologized.

I’m sorry, he said with a gentleness that managed to waft from even the faxed paper page. Spirituality was the one part of his life about which he felt he was “woefully inarticulate,” is how he put it, if I recall correctly.

My dream was dead. Or was it?

His dispatch declining an interview had a second page. There I found the most extraordinarily generous and gracious of consolation prizes: a poem.

Here, Mr. Heaney said. Perhaps you can use it in some small fashion in your book.

He titled it, “A Found Poem.”

In its few words, Mr. Heaney told me a lifetime about his spirituality and beliefs, history and hopes. But it was the act of his offering me the precious poem — what amounts to a penned Eucharist – that said even more about the size of his heart and the condition of his soul.

I wept for hours when I learned of Mr. Heaney’s sudden passing last Friday after a brief illness at a hospital in Dublin. I never knew him personally, but the man had given me so much – and not just in that one act of profound kindness to a novice writer he didn’t know from Eve.

Irish television aired his funeral live on air and online Monday, while it felt as if all of Ireland stood still to honor their beloved countryman. (Could you imagine the same happening in here to honor a poet? Do you even know who our current poet laureate is?) **

Mr. Heaney was the son of a farmer from Derry who, despite intergalactic success as a literary star, remained, by all accounts, a humble, big-hearted, regular bloke.

A few of his fellow Irishmen (a tribe preternaturally gifted with words) captured some of what we are feeling in his absence.

“Seamus has been with me on every journey I have taken, and there have been many times when a retreat into his words has kept me afloat,” Bono of U2 wrote in a tribute the day after Mr. Heaney’s death. “Some of those phrases are like tattoos for me, worn very close to the heart.”

Monsignor Brendan Devlin, the main celebrant of Heaney’s funeral mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook, Co. Dublin, hit a nerve (attached to my tear ducts, apparently) when he said, “We are keenly aware of our deprivation at the disappearance from among us of Seamus Heaney.”

His disappearance — so unexpected and jolting — left a silence and a stilled a pen. There would be no more new words.

And yet the poetic embrace he’s left as a legacy is vast enough to hold those of us who drew life from his work and many generations to come.

“It was Seamus Heaney’s unparalleled capacity to sweep all of us up in his arms that we’re honoring today,” the poet Paul Muldoon said during his eulogy for his dear friend. “We remember the beauty of Seamus Heaney—as a bard, and in his being.”

I never had the chance to talk to Mr. Heaney about Spirit — at least not on this side of that gossamer veil that separates us from what the Celts called “The More.”

According to Mr. Heaney’s son, Michael, his father’s last words — sent via text message from his hospital bed to his wife of nearly 50 years, Marie, minutes before he died — said, in part, nolle timere (Latin for “don’t be afraid.”)

Perhaps he wanted to reassure her that they would be reunited. Perhaps at the festival of friends on the other side, where there is a forever of found poems and eternal embraces.

**Natasha Trethewey is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. She's also won the Pulitzer Prize. You might want to check her out.

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